Author: Roberta (Page 506 of 561)

Weekend Science Fun: Rock Around the World

Does your budding geologist pick up rocks everywhere you go? Have a buckets and bins of rocks at home?

I just came across a terrific program where children can learn more about rocks and minerals and help scientists with their research. Your child can choose a rock and send it to scientists at Arizona State University for analysis.

According to the Rock Around the World website (http://ratw.asu.edu/), you may send a rock 2 to 6 inches in size, although the preferred size is about 4 inches long. It should also be clean and free of dirt. The “About the Program” link (http://ratw.asu.edu/program.html) will give you more details and the address to send the rock.

Be sure to spend time to see the rocks that have already been sent in from your area and from around the world, and check out the rock of the month.

Tomorrow we will meet the scientist who started this program in “Meet the Scientist Monday.”

red rocks

Weightless Water Balloons

For Wow factor, this video is pretty cool. It shows two engineers “studying” what happens when you pop a water balloon in zero gravity. Warning: the scientists do discuss in some detail how they were hit with air sickness during their initial experiences with zero gravity. If you think it might be a bit too much detail for sensitive youngsters, you can turn the sound off and narrate yourself.

Bug of the Week: Caterpillar

I admit it, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to come up with something new to show you this week. Even though the weather is getting nice and the flowers are blooming, it just seemed like I’d seen it all before.

Well, at least until I visited our snapdragons…

caterpillar

Now who is that with its head in the snapdragon?

caterpillar

caterpillar

I’m afraid this post will require an edit, because I don’t know what kind of caterpillar this is. Do you have any guesses?

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